WORKING SAIL:
Ten Vessels that Do Real Jobs Under Sail By Peter Stanford The waters around New York, like other seaport towns, were once crowded with sail. Brigs, schooners and sloops brought in the bricks and granite that built the city, and the harvest of farms and fisheries that fed it. On Sea Day Weekend, May 21-24, a fleet of ten sailing vessels will come into the East River, vessels of the same general kind that fished our shores and carried cargo round our waterways for the first 250 years of the city's life. They range from the modern sailing replica of the great Canadian fishing schooner Bluenose to a junk, the Mon Lei, built in Foochow about a hundred years ago. Each reflects hard-won sea learning in her hull and rig; each has her own mission she is sailing to today. They are working sailing craft, and their stories give an interesting picture of how such ships live. "Sleds," he calls them. Whether he's talking about the Stephen Taber, which sailed in the West Indies trade a hundred years ago, and sails with vacationers in Maine today, or his own beautiful Harvey Gamage, 95 feet of traditional schooner built to his order in 1973, they're "sleds" to Eben Whitcombworking vehicles meant to skid people and freight across the water. ''These ships should pay their way,'' he says. "They should be self-sufficient." The Harvey Gamage And that is how the handsome Gamage is sailed , cruising Maine waters in the summers, and the Virgin Islands in the winters, carrying passengers on the old trade routes where her predecessors carried cargoes. Eben lives with his wife Shirley in a house built shortly after the Revolution. a fitting kind of house for a shipowner in sail, overlooking one of the rivers that feed into Clinton Harbor in Connecticut. He talks quietly and with evident determination about what it takes to keep a Gamage sailing. He and Shirley began to think of building their big schooner in 1971. "We're both State of Mainers," he says. "That's where these old sleds were built. We used to see them coming in with logs from Nova Scotia for the paper mill in Bangor. Then, as that died out, the headboat trade came up to keep a few schooners busy. Its economics worked based on the cheapness of the old vessels." But what about building new-and
making it pay out? Of course you do it because you want to be in the business. And you see that other people have that instinct to sail. The need of people makes the economics of the boat.
Eben Whitcomb on the Harvey Gamage.
"Bob Douglas built the Shenandoah, and Joe Davis the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights looked good to us, so we asked Harvey Gamage to build our schooner to her design. Things went pretty fast once the decision was made. The keel was laid in September 1972. After a year's work by a crew of eight to ten men, she was finished. About halfway through I went to Harvey and told him: 'I've decided on her name.' 'What's that?' he said. He didn't waste many words, Harvey. 'Harvey Gamage,' I said. 'Oh,' he said." Obviously some feeling went into this project, and Gamage, who died last fall, must have taken some pleasure in seeing this great white schooner with his name on her transom. It's sure that Eben and Shirley do. And the Gamage does some special things. Last year in Operation Sail, she had a crew of 32 youngsters aboard, two from each of the sixteen counties of Maine. And increasingly she takes classes aboard for college semesters at sea, offered as a joint venture of Southampton College in Long Island, and Dirigo Cruises (the name of the Whitcomb's company). Some courses have been done in adult education as well. How does it work? Eben Whitcomb says that he can see his way now to building two more schooners the size of the Gamage, and keeping them busy.
Black Pearl with a capful of wind, alive from keel to truck. Photo, Peter Barlow.
The Hudson River Sloop Clearwater Pete Seeger, whose views on the value of history are expressed elsewhere in this issue (see "Letters"), would come by the one-room office of the South Street Seaport Museum ten years ago, to help out the citizens engaged in that project by singing with them, quite literally for their supper, in the street. And he'd talk about the rallying of purpose that would take place if we could build and sail on the Hudson River a great sloop like those which carried cargo and passengers on this inland arm of the sea, making it a highway of sail. The sloops were to be seen in the paintings of the Hudson River School, the great white mainsails standing out against the purple of a mountain in that breathless, shadowed calm before one of the thunderstorms the district is famous for broke upon them, or beating into the chop of the Upper Bay, mingling with shipping from the world's four corners, or lying at one of the hundreds of landing stages that lined the river's banks, picking up country produce and delivering passengers and the day's news from New York. (Commodore Perry of the famous voyage to Japan, who was nicknamed Old Bruin for his forthright ways, preferred to travel from his upriver home to the city this way, disdaining the noisy, smoky railroad that ran by his door.) Pete Seeger and his friends, united by a common concern for the life of the great river, went ahead and raised funds by donation to build their ship, and sail her in education program to save the Hudson. Last year the Hudson River Sloop Restoration, Inc., held its tenth annual meeting. The Clearwater had been rebuilt that spring (over the winter she went through some further work at the duPont Restoration Shipyard at Mystic Seaport). Early organizational problems had been overcome, not without trouble and turmoil. The sailing of the Clearwater is now supported by a membership of over 5,000 souls, with more than a dozen Sloop Clubs in three states active in her continuing educational program on the life and uses of the Hudson River. And in her turn, Clearwater has helped clean up the river, improve the waterfronts of river towns, and bring people back to the Hudson as a source of learning and recreation. Some of the principles all this works
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